1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates to an illumination normalization, more particularly, an illumination normalization apparatus of removing shadow on an image.
2. Background Art
An illumination is the most important element in an object recognition system (i.e., face recognition system). The illumination causes changes to image of an object much more than shape. For example, an ambient lighting varies with environmental conditions such as during the daytime and at night, and indoor and outdoor, and the shade generated by a light source from a certain direction may hide a main feature of object.
Recently, in order to overcome this problem, an illumination cone method, which was proposed by Georghiades, is designed. This method performs modeling changes on a face caused by illumination as the illumination cone. If a well-constructed training image was used, its performance is good, however, these model-based methods need limited assumptions and many training images, so that it is difficult to apply to a real situation. On the contrary, Retinex-based method is grounded on a fact that an image is a product of illumination and reflectance, so this is advantages that no training image is required and as a result relatively faster than other methods. In Retinex-based method an assumption is used that illumination smoothly varies but reflectance varies fast. In this assumption, the illumination can be estimated by blurring the image, and be normalized by dividing the estimated value by original image. Examples of this method are SSR (Single Scale Retinex) and SQI (Single Quotient Image). SSR uses a Gaussian filter for blurring and SQI uses a weighed Gaussian filter, which assigns different weights based on the mean value of Convolution region, to apply an effect caused by ununiform changes of illumination.
But all methods as mentioned above cannot remove a local and this may lower a recognition ratio.